"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Excuse me for returning immediately to the same topic as the last post, but one of the commenters mentioned that Jezebel had joined in on the Jesse Singal lynch mob and, when I went to follow up on that tip, I discovered this article by John “Harron” Walker:

If you must know one thing about journalist Jesse Singal, it’s that he loves reporting on trans issues — trans kids, in particular. If you must know another thing, it’s that a lot of trans people, myself included, loathe his coverage of trans issues with a once-fiery passion that has since cooled into a dormant rage.
On Monday, The Atlantic revealed that they are the latest mainstream publication to play host to Singal’s bulls–t, publishing “When Children Say They’re Trans,” the cover story for their upcoming July/August issue. . . .
Why does someone like Jesse Singal keep getting paid to write about trans s–t? I reached out to a number of editors and other staffers at The Atlantic on Monday in an attempt to find out. Emily Lenzner, Atlantic Media’s SVP of Communications sent me a glowing press release about the cover story and told me that she’d be “happy to answer questions.” So, I called the phone number in her emailed signature and left a message with her assistant. She never called me back, and by Tuesday morning she seemed less than happy to answer questions. “I’m not sure how productive getting on the phone will be given your social media feed and unprofessional approach and language in your emails to the author,” Lenzner said in an email. . . .
Why does he insist on covering these stories for no discernable reason? Seriously! What’s his f–king deal???
Since he won’t tell me himself — my tweets and emails have gone unanswered — here’s what I think Jesse Singal’s deal is: He’s a reactionary with a deep mistrust of the informed consent model of trans health care that has allowed a lot of trans people, myself included, to get on hormones in a matter of weeks. . . .
Singal’s reporting also suggests a cultural anxiety about the growing number of trans people who self-identify as trans without an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which would explain why he’s so interested in reporting on trans people who get it wrong. Without delving into personal, perhaps even perverse, speculation, I’d say that he so frequently writes about trans kids as a smokescreen for his anti-trans sentiment.

Walker here is not-so-subtly promoting a narrative — a propaganda theme — beloved by LGBT activists, namely that any heterosexual person who reports critically on their movement must have “issues,” some sort of personal psychosexual problem that explains their “obsession.”

My all-time favorite response to such attacks was by Wendy Shalit. A guy tried to convince her that her commitment to premarital chastity was a psychological “hang-up,” a consequence of repressive inhibition.

“I don’t have any hang-ups,” she told him. “You’re just a pervert.”

Bingo. Perverts are always trying to convince us that anyone who criticizes vice and defends traditional morality is either (a) an envious spoilsport or (b) a hypocrite hiding their own depravity behind a smokescreen of puritanism, if not indeed (c) both. Implied in their insulting insinuations is that there can be no legitimate reason to prefer chastity to promiscuity, or otherwise to uphold Judeo-Christian values.

Heterosexual hedonists do this, too, of course. The womanizer Charlie Sheen owed much of his fame to his “bad boy” reputation, and rejected all criticism as envy of his promiscuous lifestyle. Sheen wrecked his marriage, destroyed his career and contracted HIV, convinced all the time he was “winning” and the rest of us were just envious losers.

Sheen’s arrogant folly involved a sort of rationalization that is commonplace among LGBT activists, who seem to imagine that everybody should be gay, and would be, were it not for “homophobia.”

Is “anti-trans sentiment” irrational? Is it “reactionary” for Jesse Singal to report about those who reject the transgender cult mentality? Is it wrong to be concerned about the increasing numbers of adolescents pulled into the vortex of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”?

The important question here: Who should be the arbiter of right and wrong? The transgender “woman” formerly known as John Walker?

This lunatic has nominated himself/“herself” as qualified to pass judgment on Jesse Singal’s sincerity and, by proxy, to condemn as “reactionary” anyone who criticizes transgender ideology for any reason.

“Who is this person?”

BEFORE: John H. Walker, circa 2015.

AFTER: Harron Walker, April 2018.

Whenever I encounter a dishonest, insulting or just plain crazy argument, my first instinct is to research the author in hope of gaining some insight about the bad person behind these bad ideas. In this case, I discovered that John H. Walker attended prestigious Sarah Lawrence College (annual cost of attendance $68,866 including room and board) where he majored in “Liberal Arts, Nonfiction Writing, Gender/Queer Studies, French Literature, Medieval/Renaissance Studies” and graduated in 2011. Why anyone would spend $275,464 for such a degree is a profound mystery, but as to why John Walker became transgender (beginning hormone treatment in March 2017), he/“she” has offered some interesting clues. Consider these excerpts of a colloquy between Walker and his/“her” friend, Yale-educated novelist Larissa Pham:

WALKER: Anyway, I spent a good chunk of Saturday wandering around New York by myself after finishing my shift at the store I work at in the city. I walked around Central Park, read Nameless Woman on a bench by some ducks, and popped into a fancy older Midtown bar once I got cold. I didn’t plan to do any of this when I left work. I just…recognized these impulses as they popped into my head and then acted on them. This probably sounds pretty basic for most people, but flexing my frontal lobe is still kind of new to me. Transitioning, if I remove all the gendered specifics of it, has meant recognizing what I want my life to look like and how I want to live it, and my guiding principles since deciding to transition a little over a year ago have been What do you want? Does this bother you? and What are you gonna do about it? . . .
Wandering around by yourself gets lonely, though, and the cisheteropatriarchy’s persistent hum of you don’t have a booooooyfriend you worthless biiiiiiiiiiiiiitch had gotten pretty loud by the time I hopped on the subway to meet up with friends in Bushwick. I guess I was feeling kind of raw because I kept seeing all these late-teens/early-20something straight couples and feeling personally attacked lol. It brought up a lot of feelings I didn’t realize I had, much less held onto, about being extremely jealous of the girls I went to college with. Think white hipster girl in the mid-to-late aughts with two-foot bangs and 17-foot hair. She’s casual. She’s free. . . . She’s always got a boyfriend who she’s always snuggled up with . . . I guess I’m confronting that envy for the first time and the sadness I feel of being deprived of the experience. It feels like mourning. Making peace with those feelings and the alternate timeline I’ll never enter.PHAM: That makes a lot of sense! It’s really jarring to come up against ideals of personhood, or more specifically womanhood, that you realize you’ve never had access to. It hurts! Honestly, I really empathize with feeling alienated by — and excluded by — that depiction of carefree cis white womanhood. Especially in pop culture, what’s most represented is a kind of pristine, beautiful, easy, cis white girlhood — I always think of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides lol — that is denied to so many of us, for so many reasons. But when the dominant narratives of what femininity looks like are so limiting, it’s painful to realize that that’s not you, and maybe it never was you. It can feel really isolating, and almost like Is there something wrong with me if I can’t live a life like that? Or it feels unfair, like: Why couldn’t my life be that easy? But at the same time…I would never want to change anything about who I am! And even when I felt really hurt or unlovable or excluded by these depictions of womanhood, I would never want to change myself!WALKER: I don’t even wanna be That Girl! And I definitely don’t wanna date Her Boyfriend!PHAM: But it would be nice to have the opportunity to turn it down. It’s hard to be confronted with the fact that you never had a choice.WALKER: It’s like, you’re realizing that you didn’t experience this thing, realizing that you didn’t experience it because you were foreclosed from experiencing it from the start, and then making peace with that denial all at once. Figuring out what womanhood looks like when it doesn’t look like Womanhood… It’s just…woof.

Do you see that envy is the root of Walker’s problem? Whatever his underlying problems before enrolling in college may have been, John Walker looked at his classmates (72% of Sarah Lawrence students are female) and was “extremely jealous” of their (seemingly) easy lives.

Envy is the worst emotion in the world, rivaled only by self-pity. These two emotions are natural companions in the immature mind. Believing his personal misery to be a result of injustice, the spoiled child sulks and, seeing someone who seems happier, thinks: “How unfair!”

Envy is the poisonous fruit of an ungrateful heart. John H. Walker is (or at least once was) a remarkably handsome young man and, considering that he could afford to spend $275,464 for a liberal arts degree, he must come from an affluent background. How many young men might have envied his good fortune? Oh, to be a rich and handsome boy at a posh private college where nearly 3/4 of the students are girls! Son, I’d dive in headfirst and never surface again! Call 911 and tell the rescue crew to bring a crow bar to pry me out, I’d be in so deep! But I digress . . .

There is a reason some things are called “fantasies,” because if you pursued your wildest dreams in real life, very bad things might happen. Yes, it was easy to envy Charlie Sheen’s seemingly glamorous life — remember when he shacked up with two porn starlets? — just as it’s easy to imagine myself doing Sarah Lawrence College girls three at a time, but the voice of sanity (or conscience, if you have one) tells you there must be some downside to the fantasy life you might wish you were living.

Having a vivid imagination can be a curse, and who knows what mischief I’d get into if I ever hit the Powerball? If I am not grateful for my poverty, perhaps the rest of the world should be. Crazy people are dangerous, and with $150 million? Don’t get me started. I’m a happily married grandfather, a respectable family man. I don’t need that kind of trouble.

What went wrong in the life of young John H. Walker to cause him to imagine his life would be better as a simulacrum of a woman? Sigmund Freud notoriously asserted that neurotic women suffered from unresolved penis envy, but what shall we say of transgender vagina envy? If this is not indisputably crazy, how can anything be called crazy?

Or is it “reactionary” to call such delusions crazy? Is it “reactionary” to say that impressionable teenagers who start binge-watching YouTube “transition” videos should not be encouraged to pursue such fantasies? Is it “reactionary” to suggest Amanda McKenna did not improve her life by amputating her breasts and becoming “Miles” McKenna?

Common sense has become hate speech, and the social justice warriors (SJWs) are demonizing Jesse Singal for daring to suggest that maybe we ought not unconditionally surrender our sanity to the transgender cult. Because “social justice” is a mirage, as Friedrich Hayek observed, it should not surprise us that this ideology has become a pretext for lunatics to assert their “right” to tell us what we’re allowed to think.

It is one thing for Walker to invoke “the informed consent model” in defense of his/“her” pursuit of a transgender delusion. Hey, it’s a free country and the entire staff of Jezebel can take a flying leap from the Brooklyn Bridge, for all I care. It is another thing entirely, however, for transgender activists to make approval mandatory, so that no one is permitted to say, “Maybe this isn’t such a smart idea.”

The transgender thing, I mean. It’s probably wrong to suggest mass suicide by the Jezebel staff would be the smartest move they’ve ever made, although it certainly would make for an interesting NY Post headline. But why indulge in such twisted fantasies? Much better to imagine myself a Powerball winner, or Ambassador to Vanuatu . . .

Anything is possible, in my wildest dreams, including a diplomatic career in the South Pacific or orgies with Sarah Lawrence College coeds, but what would be the consequences? To dismiss the potential harm of bad decisions with a lot of jargon about “informed consent,” or to try to shame critics into silence by accusing them of “reactionary” sentiment, is to say that you have a right not only to do as you please, but to do so without encountering anyone else’s opposition or disapproval.

Your fantasies may be entirely different from my fantasies, but no one would believe me if I said I had a right to that Powerball jackpot, or an ambassadorship, or three cute college coeds. Yet the transgender cult says we are “reactionary” if we refuse to indulge their fantasies. We are required to pretend we don’t know “Miles” McKenna is actually a girl named Amanda jacked up on synthetic hormones.

Well, maybe you can bully some fools into dancing to your tune, but I’m an American citizen, and you can’t tell me what to think. Harron Walker can jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, or douse himself/“herself” in gasoline and light himself/“herself” ablaze in the middle of Fifth Avenue, but he/“she” can’t boss me around like I’m some kind of peasant.

Do you progressive fools want to know why Donald Trump is President? Go look in the mirror — it’s you, with your “social justice” nonsense and your arrogant belief that your elite college degrees entitle you to tell the rest of us what to do, what to say and even what we’ve allowed to think.

You’ve all gone mad — wacky, bonkers, berserk, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs — and now you’re trying to force us to live inside your fantasy world with transgender kids in kindergarten, “free” health care, open borders, and whatever other crackpot idea Bernie Sanders or George Soros or some deranged freak on YouTube might think up next week.

What part of “hell, no” do I have to explain to you people?

Maybe we couldn’t afford $68,866 a year to get a “Gender/Queer Studies” diploma from Sarah Lawrence College (where the actual title of one class is “Perverts in Groups: The Social Life of Homosexuals”), but this doesn’t make us your intellectual inferiors in need of your tutelage. The excrement has impacted the rotary ventilation device, and we’re not going to keep playing along with your games. It’s over, you hear me?

Go back to your Gender Studies professors and tell them their theory has failed to dislodge the “cisheteropatriarchy” from its position, which is so deeply entrenched and heavily fortified as to be certain death for any assaulting force you perverts can ever hope to bring against it.

[…] Transgender Vagina Envy and the SJW Campaign Against @JesseSingal Excuse me for returning immediately to the same topic as the last post, but one of the commenters mentioned that Jezebel had joined in on the Jesse Singal lynch mob and, when I went to follow up on that tip, I discovered this article by John “Harron” Walker […]